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Paul C�zanne: Two Sketchbooks

Two more studies of a bather type Cézanne had already drawn and painted many times (see Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-74b), but with a new variation: the right arm, instead of holding a towel, is now bent down with the hand placed on or near the hip. A further stage in this development is seen in the corresponding figure, now turned slightly to the left, in a lithograph (Venturi, Lionello. Cézanne, son art--son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris, 1936, no. 1156) and two paintings (ibid., no. 387, dated too early; Rubin, William, ed. Cézanne: The Late Work. New York, 1977, pl. 203) of the late 1890s. Yet even the two studies on this page, obviously made on the same occasion, suggest stages in a development, so numerous are the subtle differences between them. The placement of the right hand relative to the hip, that of the left hand relative to the head, the delineation of the spine and shoulders, the modeling of the buttocks and calves--none of these is fixed definitively for Cézanne; all are subject to an endless process of revision.

The faint sketch at the left, unrecognizable in itself, can be identified by comparison with the one on the verso of this page (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987-53-79a) as an incomplete copy after one of Puget's Atlases. Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 233.

Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

Paul Cézanne habitually carried small, unbleached linen sketchbooks in his pockets, which he would fill in no particular order, often using them over many years. His sketchbooks functioned rather like diaries--the ever-present recipients of his thoughts and interests, whether fleeting or resolved. Few of the sketches are directly related to his paintings, and most are of stationary subjects: works of art by other artists, his son sleeping, household objects, landscape details. The adjacent sheets shown here come from one of two sketchbooks in the Museum's collection. Cézanne's informal and unsystematic approach to his sketchbooks, his habit of jotting notes on the pages, and his tendency to include unrelated subjects on a single page combine to give a remarkably immediate view of his thoughts and working methods. He never tired of returning to certain favorite figures and compositions, such as the standing male bather seen from the back, which reappears in a number of his paintings between the mid-1870s and the mid-1890s. Innis Howe Shoemaker, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 230.